Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: Inventor of the Altair computer

Military service: USAF

Pioneer of the personal computer, Ed Roberts co-founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) while an Air Force officer stationed in Albuquerque in the 1960s. The company's first products included calculators and equipment for model rocketry, but its fortunes changed with the development of the Altair 8800 in 1974. Considered the first personal computer, the Altair appealed to many home computing hobbyists, among them Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who moved to Albuquerque in order to port the BASIC programming language to the new platform, and formed the company Microsoft to market their software. Roberts sold off his interest in MITS in 1977, on the condition that he not develop computing technology for five years. He later went to medical school and found a second career as a doctor outside Macon, Georgia.